14. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
The launch of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign allowed for a wave of thinkers, writers, creators, and especially collaborators to enrich an already strong academic environment. Chris Maier was one of the first accepted. He came in with one question: Where’s the literary publication?

In one summer, Maier pulled collaborators (both students and professors) from multiple departments and organized the production of Ninth Letter. Jennifer Gunji, assistant professor of graphic design at the university and the creative director of Ninth Letter, explains, “Chris had no desire to develop a publication on a small scale—he believed that if he was going to invest in this project, that it should essentially be a ‘shoot the moon’ project.”

Don’t let the restrained aesthetic of the Fall/Winter 2004 issue mislead you—it’s anything but small scale. The cover is a clean white sheet of uniform perforations decorated with seemingly random names and numbers printed in a sterile gray. But as with most elements of Ninth Letter, flip the page and be pleasantly surprised. Collectable cards! The perforated sections tear apart to create individual pictures and names of the collaborators. I’ll trade you Ron Carlson for Amy Lingafelter!

Styles vary between clean and eclectic, with the aesthetics of a laboratory experiment or a circus homage exploding around each written piece. Gunji and her team use unconventional visual, literary, and even tactile approaches in an attempt to push the Letter even further, “we want to evoke curiosity … we want to construct a unique starting point for typically non-visual individuals to enrich their literary experience through design.”
Rebecca Tierney